Paint Branch High School adds new menu items to please picky eaters

Montgomery County schools added kiosks with fruit and burgers to keep students eating on site.

Oct. 24—A couple of blocks from Paint Branch High School, in Maryland’s Montgomery County, there's a strip mall with a 7-Eleven, a Pizza Hut and a Chinese restaurant. And every day around 11 a.m., the students from Paint Branch start rolling in. Kelvinesha Palmer, 18, in braids and a baseball cap, emerges from 7-Eleven with a drink and some chicken wings. Price tag: $7.77.

That’s a lot more than the $0.40 she would have paid for lunch at school. Palmer qualifies for reduced-price meals because her mom earns less than 185 percent of the federal poverty level. But since Kelvinesha has a part-time job, serving food at a retirement home, she skipped the cafeteria and splurged.

"I just didn’t like what they were having today," Palmer says. What was on the menu? "I think it was mozzarella sticks or the Beefaroni spaghetti thing."

Judging from the crowd at the strip mall, a lot of kids didn’t like what was on the menu. At Paint Branch, just a quarter of the 2,000 students eat the school meal.

City officials are weighing changes to school menus less than one year after earlier changes drew parent criticism. Officials say those menu changes were not final, and an advisory board is suggesting healthier, fresher dishes and a more expansive in-class breakfast program.